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  • nick 🇦🇺nick@theblower.au
    Oct 18, 2026, 10:51 PM

    @troberts A little factoid I came across recently to put the amount of money being spent in perspective...

    The current USA datacenter Capex is running at about 1.8 Apollo Programs per year. That's the entire 11 or so year run of the Apollo program, inflation adjusted, twice over, being spent annually, and increasing.

    To date AI datacenter rollout is currently the second most expensive works program ever in the USA (I think that it was the railway network the beats it), but it's spent that in a few years instead of decade and multi-decade scales like the other big programs.

    Which kind of proves that there is enough money for us to have nice things, and a nice world, if the money is directed appropriately.,

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  • Jon Sullivanjoncounts@mastodon.nz
    Oct 19, 2026, 5:42 AM

    @nick @troberts

    > The current USA datacenter Capex is running at about 1.8 Apollo Programs per year. That's the entire 11 or so year run of the Apollo program, inflation adjusted, twice over, being spent annually, and increasing.

    Yikes! That’s an extraordinary statement!

    I went look for a source and, while I couldn’t find an exact one, I did learn that “In 2020 dollars—the most recent completed fiscal year at the time of writing—Apollo would cost an equivalent $257 billion dollars” (that’s everything the US spent on hardware, facilities, and overhead directly associated with Project Apollo between fiscal years 1960 and 1973, link to science paper below).

    Also, from Bloomberg this month, “Roughly $750 billion. That's how much Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google owner Alphabet Inc. are expected to devote to capital expenditures this year alone.”

    So, yes, what you say seems entirely plausible. If anything, it might be an underestimate.

    We could have more than a decade of human exploration of space (or, free education, health care for everyone, no more poverty, etc.), but instead we’re funnelling the world’s wealth into building slop machines.

    doi.org/10.1016/j.spacepol.202

    bloomberg.com/features/2026-ai

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